Shardul Shah on Wiz Acquisition Closing and Index Ventures' Journey

out. They're gonna buy something and then infuse it with new technology potentially, including AI. I'd be shocked and disgusted if they didn't use at least a little bit of leverage, Sean.

Yeah, me too. Me too. Well, without further ado, we have our next guest in the Reream waiting room. Let's bring in Shardul from Index Ventures. How you doing?

What's happening?

Hey guys, thanks for having me.

How uh well, sorry, first time on the show. Please introduce yourself.

Well, it's tough to follow the Guptinator. I don't even nickname you guys yet.

I know. We need to please please use the nickname. Yes,

we we created it. We wanted to this stuff. It's gonna be great.

I would love to use it. I texted him yesterday a Dr. Evil emoji with a billion dollar headline.

Oh, yeah.

Works a little bit better. Nice to meet you guys. I'm a I'm a partner at Index Ventures.

We're a multi-stage firm, one team, one dream. Uh investing in some of the best companies. That is putting it lightly because your guys' track record is insane.

No one's surprised anymore when a when there's a massive exit and you guys did at least a couple of the rounds.

Yeah.

Um uh fun day today

uh with with Whiz closing. So you get a second opportunity to

victory

to take another victory lap after after the when did the actual uh deal get announced? It was early last year at this point for Q2. Yeah, it's official today. Um, you know, spotlight is back on the founders as it's welld deserved. I think a year and a day ago, uh, it was initially announced.

Wow. So, uh, walk us through the journey of Whiz like what stuck out to them at the early stage? What was growth like? And then was this acquisition a surprise to the board? How did the investors process the news?

Yeah, for me the the story started um over a decade ago. Um I I I joined a meeting with Assaf. Uh he was like 30 minutes late. Um I'm Indian so it was like on time for me.

Okay.

Um but 72 hours later we had a signed term sheet.

Amazing.

And so I had a front row seat at um observing Assaf, Roy, Ammy, and and Yanon um develop deeper trust over time. um exert high quality decision- making um have uh imagination and operational excellence in their first uh adventure. Yeah. Which is a company called Odalum and it was acquired by Microsoft. Fast forward a few years later um Assoft calls me on my birthday.

Um and you know it's like let's go

birthday present. Deal flow. Let's go. Nothing's better for a venture capitalist on their birthday than some deal flow. Well, my wife and kids are watching, so let's let's if we can, but it was pretty good. Um, and so we were we were on board. Um, you know, we had pure belief and conviction

uh in the founders. I think a couple weeks ago, you had um Aiden uh and Asher from from Flappy on

Flapping. Uh you know, Aiden taught me something recently about our business. He he taught me that conviction is the currency of progress.

And and so the first investment I joined the board at the seed stage together with Gilly Renan and and Doug Leone um and of course the founders. And then about nine months later um index led the A. Two months later we led the B. And we kept, you know, leading rounds um as the company uh continued to develop in different dimensions, right? And so as conviction grew, um we were able to build what's now the largest position uh in in Viz, which was

Yeah. And and and talk about kind of the like why those rounds were happening so quickly. There's there's so much chatter and kind of pressure that that teams are feeling now around being the fastest to company to 100 million of ARR but a lot of the ARR numbers being thrown around today are are more just like you know uh usagebased revenue whereas whiz was like actually an enterprise you know uh actually an enterprise product like more traditional uh ARR uh But but talk about the growth across those those few rounds.

Yeah, you know, the the first the series A was about two weeks after they had launched into market and they had two customers at the time. Uh one of the two um index had introduced and so we knew the the chief security officer of of a confectionary company, a large one uh uh that in that you know partnered with whiz and and the truth is it wasn't data, right? This is like a intellectual snob who was not doing me any favors uh but took a point of view on the people on the platform that they were building and basically sent me a voice message that sounded like a country song. And so that created belief. Um uh a few weeks later we recruited um Colin Jones um as the first CRO of Whiz. He he we knew him from Duo Security, a previous investment index had made. and Colin's mentor's mentor who who's now one of our venture partners, Zach Gerlock, tried to convince Colin not to join. It's like there's no product market fit. Going back to, you know, Jordy, your point that sometimes AR doesn't tell you the story. Um, and the the truth is it's about the qualitative impression of the business, not just the pure quantitative. And so when Colin did his diligence, he understood that there was incredible product market fit that on the back of a a really rich pipeline of customers led to the next investment. And you know, the sequence kind of continued as the product surface area expanded and they were delivering more capabilities in a shorter period of time with high attach rate to customers while building a deeper denser team across different functions. If you were close enough and had context, your conviction was clear.

Uh, how do you think the combined entity looks going forward? Um, a lot of people understand Google's business. They have a lot of stuff that needs security. They also have GCP. They offer a lot of uh services, but how do you think these uh these companies will work together going forward?

Yeah, whiz is at the center of three tailwinds. Cloud spend, security spend, and AI spend.

Yeah. As we know, we we're in an AI era where every workload needs to be secure. Um, Google has incredible resources. They have incredible infrastructure and I think it just um extends Whiz's mission.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations and we will talk to you soon.

Let us know when you find the next Whiz. Basically, if you lead,

you know, two rounds in a company in in like, you know,

Here's a hint. Here's a hint. You've already had both of them on your show.

Fantastic.

That's brutal. That doesn't do anything for us.

All right, we'll look through the thousand We'll look through the thousand guests and and we'll pick the the needle out of the

hay stack in this haststack.

Awesome. Well, congrat congratulations to the whole team uh at Whiz and uh of course the whole uh index team as well

and we'll talk to you soon.

Great to meet you.

Thank you. Cheers.

Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And uh we need to revisit uh we got to head from index over to Sequoia because we got to revisit this post. So Run said, "The person who names a thing is often more powerful than the real discoverer." And Andrew Reed chimes in and says, "I call this Reed's law."

Just immediately raises. It's so funny because I actually think of this as Reed's law now. I I I remember that Rune posted it, but uh when I when I refer to this concept, Reed's law immediately sticks in my head and it is powerful. Uh